Nokia Admits Lumia 610 Still Not Cheap Enough

At Mobile World Congress, the Nokia Lumia 610 was shown-off as the new entry-level Windows Phone 7 option from Nokia. However, the phone-maker has now admitted that it needs to produce an even cheaper phone to challenge Android.

Over the past few years Nokia has given us plenty of reason to doubt many of its decisions. A string of bad ones led to the company falling from the top of the smartphone game to the lowly position of "has-been". But it's talking sense this time. In a meeting with Pocket-lint, Nokia executive VP Niklas Savander admitted that Nokia needs to do more in order to make its Windows Phone 7 devices compete with budget Android phones.

"We are competing with Android. Android is in many markets at the 100 Euro price already, so that would suggest that if we are at 189 Euro with the Lumia 610 we still have work to do when it comes to creating a lower end first time user smartphone," said Savander. "We have a lot riding on the fact that we need to get a lower price point," he added.

In what amounts to speaking out against his company's newest product, Savander's words seem pretty bold. Adding to the problem, the Nokia Lumia 610 had to make several technical sacrifices in order to get down to the not-all-that-lowly price of 189 Euro. It has just 256MB of RAM and an 800MHz processor, where first-wave Windows Phone 7 phones used double the RAM and 1GHz processors. Savander claims you have to push the phone hard to see these limitations take a toll on the phone, though.

Aside from these aspirational comments, Savander didn't delve into exactly how a 100 Euro Windows Phone 7 handset might work. 2GB internal memory, a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM doesn't sound like a recipe for fun, especially not in device with non-expandable storage. However, would a decent sub-£100 Windows phone make you think twice about buying Android? Let us know in the comments.